Atypical, right-enhanced minds, are rarely studied in the scientific literature, where left dominance is the norm. I study the lesser-understood minds of poets, artists, musicians, mediums, mystics, shamans and autistic savants who use unconventional means to access truth and beauty: through dreams, hallucinations, trance, NDEs, telepathy, automatic handwriting, séances, or a Ouija board. I invite you to discover their minds, and perhaps better understand your own.

MY BOOK

After 20 years of research and writing, my book, In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses (2015)Exeter, UK:Imprint Academic, is available from the publisher in a very well-made paperback edition. Initially a #1 Hot New Release in Neuropsychology and Poetry/Literary Criticism on Amazon.com, it can also be acquired on Amazon in most countries, either in print, aKindle edition, or both. If you are interested in consciousness, creativity, poetry, psychology, and/or the paranormal, I think you will find it an illuminating read. You can read the first chapter for free on Amazon!

Sacks says that, despite the bizarre forms they may take, hallucinations are a rather common
experience. They can present
themselves using any or all forms of sensory experience--aural, visual, olfactory or tactile--or you can seem to leave your body all together. Sacks sees schizophrenic hallucinations as a category apart and does not consider them in this book. If you are interested in psychotic hallucinations, see my earlier post.

As others before him have done, Sacks suggests that folklore,
religion and aboriginal art may all have derived their myths and imagery from hallucinations, often with a sense of
divine provenance. Julian Jaynes, whom Sacks mentions, considered poetry and prophecy as originating
in the right or non-dominant hemisphere and said that all
people before 1000 B.C. had divided minds. Jaynes believed that a singular consciousness arose after
the introduction of written language and migrations that dealt a blow to consensual
acceptance of the existence of the gods. Sacks recognizes that altered states produce anomalous sense impressions; but uses first-hand contemporary accounts, including his own, along with his up-to-date knowledge of brain
anatomy and neuroscience to present his own case.

The major source of hallucinations, for Sacks, is in the area of
the brain responsible for interpreting the sense experience during
normal conscious experience. So, the right inferotemporal cortex, responsible for face recognition, will
hallucinate faces; the visual word form area in the left fusiform gyrus will produce hallucinations of letters, musical notes,
mathematical symbols and numbers. Usually, the letters are unreadable or
nonsensical, such as in the case of a woman with Charles Bonnet Syndrome who saw “black
Hebrew letters dressed in ballet dresses of white . . . danc[ing] to beautiful
music” that appeared from right to left. Right to left is significant, because the left hemisphere is projecting the vision.

Additionally, different brain areas may be simultaneously activated, producing an
“involuntary, incongruous collision or conflation.” Dancing Hebrew letters may
be one effect; or, you might get surreal imagery, with a flower jutting out from the side of a face. Human figures may be seen floating through the street; or someone
may produce a double, another self, who walks beside or in front of them. Think Moses, Jung or Flournoy's account of Hélène Smith's dissociative priest. Visions
can expand, filling up the whole horizon, or shrink to minuscule beings. Handwriting can be written on the wall. The divine is often felt. How else to explain these strange occurrences?

As in
Charles Bonnet Syndrome brought on by blindness, it is when a sense is deprived
of input that the hallucinatory goes into overdrive. Dark caves, vast deserts, frigid, lonely mountain-trekking, long-distance sails or car trips, may produce hallucinations. Whether seeking
sensory deprivation in specialized tanks or being thrown as a prisoner into a dark dungeon,
the effect is the same: hallucinations. It is the lack of external input that produces compensatory hyperactivity in
the regions responsible for the neglected sense. The dreaming mind falls prey to
the same overcompensation.

While visual hallucinations may be produced where there is an
organic problem, with entertaining or terrifying results, one-line auditory
hallucinations can present themselves under external circumstances that require
immediate action. They command or give a particular message. Anyone who is
sufficiently stressed in a dangerous situation can produce a commanding voice.
It happened to Sacks when he was injured on a mountain and needed to keep going
despite the pain. Freud even had two sense modalities present themselves at
once when he was in extreme danger: “I heard the words as if somebody was shouting
them into my ear, and at the same time I saw them as if they were printed on a
piece of paper floating in the ear.” A sense of another’s presence, not seen or
heard, but felt, is also a common experience, often described as on the
right.

The most bizarre hallucinations are usually the
product of drugs. Cocaine and amphetamines stimulate the reward systems via the
neurotransmitter dopamine. Hallucinogens—mescaline, psilocybin, LSD, and
probably DMT—act by boosting serotonin in the brain. Stimulants affect left-hemispheric
approach action; hallucinogens boost internal right-hemispheric
events.Sacks describes his own
experience taking 20 Artane pills, normally used in much smaller quantities for Parkinson’s disease. He
hallucinates an entire conversation with friends, sight unseen, from one room
to the next as he made breakfast for them, only to discover they were never there
at all and he had cooked way too many eggs. He also hears the deafening sound of a
helicopter overhead and rushes outside thinking his parents have dropped by to
visit from England. No, they have not! Back in the kitchen, he carries on a long,
philosophical conversation with a spider on the wall.

Sacks’s most fascinating account involves staring at a spot on
his sleeve, motionless, for 12 hours, as the armies of the English and the
French prepared to fight the battle of Agincourt in 1415, the direct result of
having read a historical text along with Shakespeare’s Henry V. The two texts now conflate in miniature and in Technicolor. On another occasion, stoked on amphetamines,
he reads straight through a 19th-century, 500-page textbook on migraines, not sure
whether he is reading or writing the book, wondering who in his time could be like this admirable author from the past. A very loud external voice says,
“You silly bugger! You’re the man!” This is not the first case I’ve read of an avocation
unveiled by a hallucinatory voice.

Yes,
hallucinations or delirium can solve problems and provide important
breakthroughs. Sacks cites Vladimir Nabokov who did advanced mathematical
calculating when delirious. With malarial fever, Alfred Russell Wallace
conceived of the idea of natural selection. Poet Richard Howard saw a pageant
of literature acted out by the staff in period dress on different floors in the hospital where he had just had back
surgery. Although not mentioned in the book, Francis Crick got his vision of DNA on LSD. Other folks converse with their deceased spouse without the aid of drugs or delirium. Mrs. Blake, for one, as I know from my own research.

Sacks’s
bottom line is this: “Something has to happen in the mind/brain for imagination
to overleap its boundaries and be replaced by hallucination. Some dissociation
or disconnection must occur, some breakdown of the mechanisms that normally
allow us to recognize and take responsibility for our own thoughts and
imaginings, to see them as ours and not as external in origin . . . . but
dissociation cannot explain everything, for quite different sorts of memory may
be involved.” Connecting with my
earlier post on OBEs/NDEs, Sacks attributes these events to the right
hemisphere because of its role in body image and vestibular sensations.